


Two Steps Back

by jamestiqueeriuskirk



Series: Steps [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst and Humor, Awkward Conversations, Awkward Sexual Situations, Bisexual Dean, Coming Out, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Shovel Talk, it is subtle however
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-16
Updated: 2014-06-16
Packaged: 2018-02-04 22:48:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1796080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jamestiqueeriuskirk/pseuds/jamestiqueeriuskirk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Now, Dean liked to consider himself a pretty open-minded guy, at least as far as sex went. Ever since that first time, so long ago, he and Susie Elkins under the bleachers up in…had it been Minnesota? He wasn’t sure now. Point was, Dean took a very lax approach to sex. He liked it, quite a bit, in fact, so it would be something of a dick move to pass judgment on other people for also enjoying things in the privacy of their own homes, motel rooms and bathroom stalls. Weird stuff, he could handle. There’d been that girl in Jackson who left him bruised and raw-throated by the end of the night, and the one in Nevada who dropped to her knees right in the alley outside the bar, and the whipped cream incident in Maine, and even that one guy, when he was very, very drunk…well, that wasn’t important.</p>
<p>Bottom line, there wasn’t much he condemned, so long as everyone involved was enjoying it. But even he had his limits, and walking in on his own little brother balls-deep in the Devil against the utility room wall, well, that just crossed every last goddamn one of them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two Steps Back

**Author's Note:**

> uhhh I'm not happy with the way this turned out at all. I still can't decide if it's meant to be humor or meant to be angst. w/e I just needed to get it out of the way so I can publish part three of this series.

Growing up, Dean wasn’t much of a tea drinker. Tea was hard to come by in his line of work. Well, maybe not hard to come by, but it wasn’t something his dad ever bought, and sneaking over to corner convenience stores across the street from the motel to buy condoms was one thing, to buy tea bags was another. The adults he’d grown up around were more likely to offer him beer than tea, even when he was little, and roadside diners weren’t known for their…anything, really, but people definitely didn’t go to Cheryl’s Roadside Truck Stop for a nice cup of English breakfast. It was easier to just drink coffee. Besides, Sam had come back from Stanford with a taste for tea, and that made tea _girly_ , by association.

But when they’d set up shop in the Men of Letters’ bunker, they’d suddenly been provided suitable accommodations for a good number of culinary possibilities. Dean didn’t transform into Martha Stewart overnight, god, no, but he did like the full kitchen.

There was a kettle (a real kettle, imagine that, Sam usually made tea in the motel room coffee pot, or the microwave, if they were lucky enough to have one) waiting on the stove when they arrived, a little old, a little dusty, but serviceable, once it was cleaned up, and Dean came to appreciate having a cup of tea every once in a while, on lazy afternoons when they weren’t working any cases, when it was just he and Sam and Cas and Kevin and (ever so unfortunately) Lucifer, and he could lounge around reading Vonnegut or watching TV with Sam (maybe not that last one. Sam seemed to have Lucifer clinging to him wherever he went, lately, and Dean wished the guy would take a hike once in a while. He just wanted to spend the day with his brother without Satan hanging over his shoulder, thanks).

This was one of those days, the bunker a little chilly, even with the heater on, and Dean finally dragged himself out of bed around midday, shuffling through his morning routine and heading to the kitchen to put the kettle on.

On his way, he passed Kevin’s room, where he was sitting at his desk, pouring over some novel or another, and Lucifer’s room, which was empty, his bed strangely cold and unlived in. It gave Dean a momentary feeling of unease, just for a beat, but he dismissed it and pressed on.

He padded into the kitchen and started banging around in the cabinets, looking for the box of tea bags he was sure was there somewhere, he knew Sam had picked one up last time he’d been out shopping. He couldn’t find any above the stove or in the cabinets under the counter, however, so he crossed over to the walk-in pantry to continue his search.

The light clicked on, and Dean started poking around the shelves. He was just reaching for a box on the top shelf when a thump made him stop dead.

The thump came again. Then again. Dean frowned, and walked back out to the kitchen. No one was there, and he could no longer hear the noises. He walked back into the pantry, and was greeted by a now steady chorus of thumping noises.

The way the bunker was set up, the back wall of the pantry laid adjacent to the utility room, and Dean’s best guess was that was where the noise was coming from, so he left the kitchen and headed down the hall. He couldn’t imagine what it was, but maybe the washing machine was broken again, and dammit, he’d told Cas not to just dump all his clothes in one load.

Reaching the door, he swung it open and stepped inside.

Lucifer, he thinks, noticed him before he noticed Lucifer, and _Sam_ , Lucifer and Sam _together_ , Lucifer reaching to grasp Sam’s shoulders as his widening eyes met Dean’s, crying out for Sam to stop, hold on a minute, and _holy freaking shit_ that was _not_ a broken washing machine. 

 

 

Now, Dean liked to consider himself a pretty open-minded guy, at least as far as sex went. Ever since that first time, so long ago, he and Susie Elkins under the bleachers up in…had it been Minnesota? He wasn’t sure now. Point was, Dean took a very lax approach to sex. He liked it, quite a bit, in fact, so it would be something of a dick move to pass judgment on other people for also enjoying things in the privacy of their own homes, motel rooms and bathroom stalls. Weird stuff, he could handle. There’d been that girl in Jackson who left him bruised and raw-throated by the end of the night, and the one in Nevada who dropped to her knees right in the alley outside the bar, and the whipped cream incident in Maine, and even that one guy, when he was very, very drunk…well, that wasn’t important.

Bottom line, there wasn’t much he condemned, so long as everyone involved was enjoying it. But even he had his limits, and walking in on his own little brother balls-deep in the Devil against the utility room wall, that just crossed _every last goddamn one of them_.

“What the _Hell_ were you thinking, Sam?” He was trying to maintain his patience, but Lord, Sam was testing it.

Sam was sitting, arms crossed before him at the end of the kitchen table opposite Dean. His hair was ruffled (from Lucifer’s fingers, Dean’s brain helpfully supplied) and there was a bruise coming to on his neck. His shirt was rumpled, and the buttons weren’t lined up correctly with their holes, but he could hardly be blamed for that. He’d kind of had to throw on his clothes while simultaneously screaming at Dean and trying to tug him off Lucifer from where he was cowered on the floor, hands raised to shield his face from Dean’s blows.

He looked simply miserable, and Dean wasn’t sure whether to feel sorry for him or take a vicious pleasure in that.

His current feelings towards Lucifer, however, were more easily named. Lucifer looked even more despondent than Sam, his nose still steadily bleeding from where one of Dean’s more well-timed whacks had caught him before Sam managed to haul him away. He kept touching it gingerly, maybe trying to stop the bleeding, maybe just checking to see if it had stopped on its own. He was still a little lost when it came to messy, human functions. Dean, however, did not feel even a bit of sympathy for him, his pain, or his stupid, bloodstained shirt.

He was huddled in the doorway, glancing, nervously, from time to time, between the brothers, keeping silent for the moment. He’d tried to sidle up to Sam at first, but Dean’s angry and very vocal protest caused him to make a hasty retreat to the doorframe, where he was kept at bay by Dean’s periodic, livid glares.

“It’s not like we were expecting you to come barging in, Dean.” Sam tried.

“You know that’s not what I meant, damn it!” Dean clenched his fists. “There shouldn’t have been anything for me to barge in on!”

“I’m an adult, Dean, and so is Lucifer. We can make our own decisions, and we don’t need your approval.”

Dean wanted to laugh. It wasn’t remotely funny, but in that moment he was gripped by a sick, bitter urge to burst out laughing. If Sam had been talking about anyone else, this could have been a scene out of a bad drama, the young protagonist standing up to his overbearing older brother, declaring himself to be deeply in love with this boyfriend, and nothing, not family or deep-seated prejudice, could keep them apart. That was a _very big_ if. As it was, Sam was talking about _Lucifer,_ and this was a different situation entirely.

“Sam, you’re not thinking straight. You can’t be! You just had sex with the Devil.” Sam flinched, which Dean took as a good sign. Maybe he was starting to see reason, with it spelled out like that.

“Technically, I’m not the Devil anymore.” Lucifer offered, tentatively, falling silent when Dean shot him a dirty look.

“I know he gets a bad rep, Dean, but remember you said you’d give him a chance?” Sam pleaded, eyes wide and brows raised in his most entreating of looks.

“I said I’d give him a chance to stay here, if he could behave himself,” Dean huffed out. “Not give him a chance to get into your pants!”

“It’s not like that was his end goal, when he showed up.” Sam protested.

“Oh, yeah? How do you know?” With that, Dean received a withering look. He remembered, just as well as Sam did, how desperate Lucifer had been when he’d first arrived, how he’d battled a fever and dehydration for weeks, finally overcoming it with Sam’s help, all while Dean hovered, trying to convince Sam to throw him out. And yeah, it was unlikely he’d been thinking of sex through all that, but Dean was certainly not dropping his suspicions that easily. He tried again.

“It doesn’t matter, Sam! He’s Satan. He might have lost all his angel mojo, but that doesn’t make him trustworthy. It just makes him powerless. He’s manipulating you!”

Sam stared. “Into what, Dean? What’s he going to get out of this?” He tossed up his hand, letting it fall back down and hit his thigh with a smack.

Dean didn’t have an answer for that, beyond “sex on tap,” so he regrouped and tried a different tactic. “Remember Ruby? You thought you could trust her too, and look how that ended.”

Sam looked, for a moment, genuinely hurt. His mouth hardened. “This isn’t like that.”

“If it helps, I promise I have no nefarious plans in mind.” Lucifer cut in, causing Dean to spin around to throw him a vividly furious look.

“You shut up.” Lucifer did so, biting his lip and his eyes gravitating towards Sam, as if for guidance, in a way that suggested more than an afternoon’s worth of familiarity. Which, of course, begged a question Dean hadn’t yet considered.

“How long has this been going on?” He demands, glaring first at Sam and then at Lucifer.

Sam looks reluctant to answer.

“How long, Sam?”

It isn’t Sam who answers, but Lucifer. “A month.”

Dean’s mouth thins into a very fine line. “And you didn’t think I needed to know about this?”

Sam flounders around for a minute at that. “It never really came up in conversation.”

“What happened to being open with each other?”

“I wasn’t lying to you, Dean. I just… didn’t tell you because I knew you’d react like this!”

“So, what, you think I’m overreacting? You’ve been sticking your dick into Satan. Do you think I should be okay with that? Sam, you always say you want normal. Well, this isn’t it.” Dean shook his head, exhausted already by this.

“I know, Dean. This wasn’t something I ever wanted for myself-“

Dean’s eyes narrowed, and his demeanor changed completely, hackles raising and spine stiffening. He rounded on Lucifer, dangerously. “Have you been _forcing_ Sam to sleep with you? So help me, I will tear your dick off-”

At this, Lucifer’s expression shifted from one of tremendous upset to one of outright anger. “You really are unreasonably biased against me if you think I would ever-“

But Dean didn’t afford him the chance to continue, rounding next on Sam and all but sprinting over to him.

“Sam,” Dean began, grabbing his shoulders. “Is that what’s going on?” His eyes roved over Sam’s face desperately, seeking out even the slightest sign of distress.

“God, Dean, no!” Sam looked horrified, and Dean sincerely hoped it was because of the thought of that happening, not because of the defamation Lucifer’s character had just suffered. “Nothing like that. All I meant was that I never would have expected this. It just sort of… happened.” His eyes flickered over to where Lucifer was still standing, seething at Dean. He seemed to calm a bit under Sam’s gaze, shoulders relaxing minutely.

Dean was pretty sure that was _bad_.

“So you accidently fell into bed with the Devil, and now you’re just gonna be all Zen about it, is that what you’re saying?”

Sam nodded, face a little flushed, but his expression mostly peaceful. “That’s about it, dude.”

“Do you love him?”

Sam looked startled, knocked out of whack by Dean’s question. He probably should have expected it at some point, but he was honestly anticipating a lot more shouting in the meantime, and it was a little sudden. “What?”

“You must have a reason for suddenly switching teams so you could nail Satan. So, what is it, Sam? Do you love him?”

“I…” Sam glanced at Lucifer, whose face was oddly blank, then back at Dean, who was waiting expectantly if not patiently, then to Kevin, who had just pushed his way into the room.

“What’s going on, guys?” He asked, wrinkling his nose.

“Nothing.” Dean barked. Sam and Lucifer both remained quiet.

“O-okay,” he mumbled, staring at Dean for a moment, then looking between Sam and Lucifer, sighing, and walking right the fuck back out of the kitchen.

 

 

“Sam’s fucking Lucifer,” Dean moaned, sinking down onto the couch next to Cas, who immediately craned his neck to peer around Dean and through the door.

“Not- Jesus. Not _now_ , dude,” Dean squawked. “In general.”

Cas tilted his head at the announcement, but did not greatly change his expression.

“Did you know about this?” he demanded, keeping his voice low.

Cas sighed. “I had my suspicions. They did seem to be growing unusually close. I wrote it off as residual attraction between archangel and vessel, but I assume you’ve found evidence otherwise?”

Dean snorted. “If by ‘evidence otherwise’ you mean I caught them with their pants around their ankles, then yeah, I did.”

For a moment, Cas puzzles over what the phrase means. “You walked in on them having sex,” he concludes.

“Pretty much. God, I never want to see Sam’s ass again.” He shakes his head, as if doing so could somehow clear his mind of the image of his baby brother pressing the Devil against the utility room wall. Ugh. Too bad Sam and Lucifer were between him and the kitchen, because he _really_ needed a drink, but he didn’t really want to so much as pass by the doorway of any room they were occupying together right now.

Cas makes a noise of sympathy. “How are you taking it?”

“Peachy.” Dean grumbles. “I’m gonna have nightmares about this or something.”

“Dean.”

He scrubs at his eyes with his hands, a tired gesture. “I’m trying to hold it together, for Sam’s sake, but, Cas, man, this isn’t even a little bit natural, or, or _okay_.”

“Is this about Lucifer, or about Lucifer’s vessel- forgive me, it’s his body now- being male?”

“What? Of course not. Maybe a little. Sam’s just…he’s never been into dudes before. Why start with Lucifer, of all people?”

“Perhaps he was, he just felt he ought to keep it to himself.”

“But why would he do that, Cas? Does he not think he can trust me?” Dean sounded hurt.

“He may just not have been ready to tell you, Dean. I can’t say for sure. The best thing to do would be to talk to him about it.”

Dean nods, huffing out a breath. “You’re right. As soon as I can be sure Sam’s not going for round two with Lucifer, I’ll talk to him.”

“Surely they wouldn’t …go for round two, as you put it, so soon after being caught. Sam is likely to be just as distressed as you. Certainly, he won’t be thinking of sex.”

 

 

Lucifer pulled himself off of Sam’s softening cock with a quiver of his exhausted legs and flopped down next to him on the bed, still panting. Sam yawned in contentment and shifted to face him.

“Maybe we shouldn’t have done that after all the trouble we caused earlier.”

“Feeling guilty, Sam?” Lucifer quirked an eyebrow.

“Not really, no,” Sam said. “But I probably should have gone after Dean, tried to smooth things over with him.”

“He was furious. There was nothing you could have done until he regained his head.”

“You’re probably right. There might not be anything I can do even _after_ he’s calmed down.”

“Sam, he may hate me, but your brother loves you. That much is perfectly clear. For all their supposed similarities, Dean is not much like Michael. He will be willing to forgive you, I am sure. You should take advantage of that.”

He sounds sad, saying this, and Sam’s heart aches a little. He’s right, after all. The difference between he and Lucifer is that his older brother has always been able to take him back, after he’s run away, after he’s started the apocalypse, _hopefully_ after he’s had sex with Satan.

Lucifer’s gaze is distant, now, and Sam knows he is remembering. Maybe wondering how differently events could have unfolded if Michael were more like Dean, and more willing to accept his wayward little brother back. It makes Sam’s head spin, a little, considering the affairs of archangels in terms of _what ifs_ , and he doesn’t think Lucifer needs to dwell on lost opportunities either. The last time that happened, he’d closed off for nearly a week and it had taken all Sam had to coax him back.

Drawing Lucifer closer, Sam presses his lips to his temple. “I’ll go find Dean,” he says, softly. “You’re right.”

Lucifer clings to him, as if he doesn’t yet want Sam to go. “Another round, first?”

Sam can’t help a shaky laugh from escaping at that. He knows it’s probably just an excuse to keep Sam with him longer, and maybe to forget, for a little while, but Lucifer sounds sincere, and if he still had his angel mojo, he’d surely want to follow through. “We’re only human, Lucifer. Well, mostly.”

Lucifer wrinkles his nose at that.

 

 

“Come to give me the shovel talk?” Lucifer asked him.

Dean lowered his raised fist from where it had been poised to knock on the door. Guy might not be an archangel anymore, but when he wasn’t painfully oblivious he was freakily perceptive. Damn. How could he possibly have known Dean was about to pay his room a visit?

Dean grunts a no, and Lucifer steps aside to allow him in (but, Dean notices, he leaves the door ajar, slightly, a ready escape route for one of them, should it come down to that).

“What the Hell are you doing with my brother?” Dean kind of wants to ask him how he knows what the shovel talk is, but he decides it’s best to get right down to the point instead.

 “Well, I thought that should be fairly obvious,” Lucifer said.

A little shit through and through, this one. But Dean wasn’t gonna let it get to him, too much. “You know what I’m asking. What’s your endgame?”

“Somehow, I suspect you won’t believe me, but nothing.”

“You’re absolutely right. I don’t believe you, and I don’t _like_ you, and if I had my way, we’d toss you out on the streets as far away from here as possible with ten bucks and a ‘good luck’.”

Lucifer nods, guardedly. Fair enough. He didn’t expect more from Sam’s elder brother, who, he still suspected, was not quite as saintly as Sam seemed to think. Though, reasonably, his opinion of Dean was quite colored, at the moment, by the pepper Dean had put in his coffee last week.

Hey, he held a grudge.

“But Sam does like you,” Dean continues. “God knows what he sees in you, but he does.” Here Dean turns to Lucifer. “And man, I just want Sam to be happy. And if you’re what it takes, then….” He trailed off, and made a noncommittal sort of noise, here. “I can’t do this. It’s bad enough talking about my feelings without having to do it with _Satan_.” His gruffest, most overcompensating tone started to bleed through. “Point is, you behave yourself, and I’ll tolerate you. For Sam’s sake.”

Lucifer supposed it was the best he could hope for, at the moment.

Dean shuffled awkwardly, unsure of what to do with himself before settling on leaving immediately, and turned to the door.

Right as he was leaving, he paused, standing in the doorframe.

“Oh, and Lucifer?”

Lucifer sighed. Here it was.

“You hurt him and I’ll break your goddamn neck.”

His lip twitched a little as he nodded his understanding.

 

 

Sam was joined, much later, in the library, by Dean, who sat down beside him stoically, and managed to go an impressive seven minutes steeling himself up to break the silence.

“Sammy.”

Sam prompted him on with a look.

“I dunno what the Hell you’re doing, and I don’t like it, and I don’t understand why you didn’t just tell me.”

All things considered, it seemed like Dean was taking it pretty well, now that he’d had some time to process. At least he wasn’t sputtering in inarticulate rage.

“I know I should have told you Dean, but I didn’t. And what’s done is done, and you’re just going to have to accept that.”

“I can try, Sam. But it’s gonna be hard for me, when every instinct I got has been screaming at me to put a bullet between Lucifer’s eyes while he’s vulnerable, even before I found out about…this thing. So help me out, Sam. I’m trying to understand, here, for your sake.

“Do you love him?”

The repetition of Dean’s earlier question didn’t come as a surprise, but Sam still wasn’t prepared for it. He wasn’t sure which would be better, easier on Dean: to claim Lucifer meant nothing to him, that he was just a warm body for cold nights, someone who was willing, and _there,_ or to assure Dean he and Lucifer were deeply in love and there was nothing to worry about and hope Dean was feeling poetic enough to be moved by that, more willing to accept the idea of Sam finding something akin to happiness where Dean had been raised to think it was unable to be found?

He settled for the truth. “I don’t know, Dean.”

“You don’t know?”

“I don’t. It’s been a _month_. But I think I might.”

Dean looks startled by that, more startled than he did when he first walked in on them together, and Sam thinks there’s something akin to fear in his eyes. A different sort of fear than the kind Sam had teased him about that time they had to work a case on an airplane. Stronger, somehow, but more subtle. Dean was afraid for him.

“It’s nothing you’ve done.” Sam assures him, reading through all the bullshit and going straight for what Dean is pointedly not saying.

 Dean scoffs, so flippantly that Sam knows he’s struck true. He’ll never get more confirmation than that, but he’s glad to have relieved Dean, if only partially, of his worry that somehow he’s responsible for this. That Sam would have been happy and normal if Dean hadn’t kicked Sam out of their motel room once when they were teenagers and their dad was away so Dean could have Daniel-from-home-room over, hadn’t spent a little too long in the men’s room of that one bar in Arizona, hadn’t been so flustered when that waiter in Florida winked at him.

And it isn’t a cure-all: Dean will still second-guess, at times, and mostly, he’s freaked out that it’s _Lucifer_ , of all beings, Sam is knocking boots with, but they’ll work through it, Sam is sure. He can’t remember the last time he felt this optimistic while everything was crashing down around him. Maybe it’s that Kevin greeted the whole mess with the same tired indifference he’d shown everything lately, maybe it’s that the worst Dean has done to Lucifer all week is flush the toilet while he’s in the shower, maybe it’s that he has Lucifer’s support to count on, now, Hell, maybe it’s just that he had sex twice this morning, but he feels okay.

Not great or anything, but _okay_ : reasonably confident Dean won’t storm out or murder him and/or Lucifer in their sleep. And that’s a start, at least.

               


End file.
